Title:	Economist.com: "Bad Weather, Bad Government"
Region:	Africa
Countries:	Ethiopa, Malawi, Botswana, Zambia
Date:	December 22, 2002
My Rating (out of 100):	85
	This excellent article was written in the economist and really captures how mismanagement of resources is really what causes so many problems in Africa. Problems that often lead to the deaths of many people. -------------------------------------------------------------------- Ethiopia faces a famine worse than the catastrophe of 1984, according to the country's prime minister. Bad weather is partly to blame. But, as elsewhere in Africa, so too is bad government ON NOVEMBER 11th, Ethiopia's prime minister, Meles Zenawi, said that his country faces a famine even more destructive that the disaster of 1984 which so appalled western television viewers. Some 15m Ethiopians, he said, will need food aid by early next year, out of a population of about 65m. He appealed for help, pleading that "we cannot cope on our own". Africa faces two separate food crises. Until now, the consensus has been that the shortage in southern Africa was more serious than the one in Ethiopia, situated in the north-east. Foreign donors have not delivered enough to feed all the hungry in either region, but they have shown more willing to help out in the south--hence the prime minister's unusually blunt appeal. Both food crises have complex causes, among them bad weather. In much of Ethiopia, the rains have failed, withering crops, killing cows and even camels, and forcing millions of peasants to run down their meagre stores or beg for maize from neighbours or relief agencies. In southern African countries such as Zimbabwe, Zambia, Malawi, Lesotho and Swaziland, a drought of exceptional severity has had the same effect. But bad weather is rarely enough, on its own, to kill large numbers of people. Famine usually requires bad government, too. In southern Africa, AIDS is another factor, weakening millions and making it harder for them to cope with hunger. There is nothing that can be done about the weather, at least in the short term, and those who are already infected with the HIV virus that causes AIDS cannot be cured. So the best hope, for now, lies in better policies, more competently implemented. In Ethiopia, the food crisis has been aggravated by the legacy of a senseless border war with neighbouring Eritrea between 1998 and 2000. This killed tens of thousands, forced 350,000 to flee their homes, blasted both countries' infrastructure and prompted foreign donors to freeze a lot of aid. In all, it cost Ethiopia an estimated $2.9 billion--almost a whole year's output for every farmer in a country where 80% of the population live on farms. Such a monumental man-made disaster has made it harder for the country to cope with a natural one. On the plus side, the current Ethiopian government is not indifferent to its people's suffering, unlike the Marxist military regime that presided over the famine of 1984, refusing to allow foreign aid in until, for multitudes of Ethiopians, it was too late. That regime was overthrown in 1991, and since then food production has steadily increased. But half the population remains desperately poor, a plight made harder to escape by insecure land tenure and the government's failure to abolish the old feudal system of extracting heavy taxes from peasants. In southern Africa, too, it is notable that well-governed countries, such as South Africa and Botswana, have not suffered food shortages, despite the drought. The hungriest countries are all, to varying degrees, misruled. Swaziland's absolute monarch tried to spend more than the food-aid budget on a private jet. (His advisers stopped him, but not before he had made the first down-payment.) Senior members of Malawi's government sold off the country's entire emergency grain reserve, and appear to have pocketed the cash. They then tried to blame the International Monetary Fund, which had advised them to sell some of the grain reserve, but had not suggested that they should pinch the money. Zambia has also had trouble with officials stealing from the food-aid budget, and has rejected food aid from America that may be genetically modified, on the ground that although it is good enough for Americans, it is not safe enough for starving Zambians. Warehouses full of American maize sit locked and undistributed in some of the worst-hit areas of Zambia. But by far the most egregious case of state-induced hunger is in Zimbabwe, where cereal production has fallen by two-thirds over the past two years, largely because the government of President Robert Mugabe is waging war on the most productive farmers. He wishes to crush white commercial farmers, in part because they helped to fund the opposition in an election he stole in March. Mr Mugabe's henchmen have tried to control the distribution of food aid, to make sure that his supporters are fed and his opponents are not. His cronies do not even trouble to disguise what they are doing: a deputy minister said that "the [ruling] party will start feeding its children before turning to those of the [opposition]". Aid agencies insist that they will not allow their supplies to be abused in this way, but they have failed to stop this sort of behaviour in the past in Sudan, Somalia, Angola and elsewhere. And Mr Mugabe's government has a legal monopoly on grain sales within Zimbabwe. It has used this as an excuse to confiscate private stocks of food, which, if large, are clearly "intended for sale" and can therefore be legally taken. As always, donors wishing to stave off famine in Africa will have to deal with some awful politicians in the countries that need help. But what choice have they, when the alternative is to turn away while people starve?